10 | March | 2008 | Silver Thimble Quilting

For the second Saturday in a row, I had the privilege of quilting with friends when the FABs converged on another FABulous FABric project. This time the friends were not located in the same place as I was–they were in three different locations in the U.S.

The chosen project was Ricky Tim’s Convergence quilt. We have been chatting on line for a while now about this project. Some of us were counting the days, some were counting the sleeps. Some were so excited that they had to hide their pattern so they wouldn’t work ahead of the scheduled day and time.

We decided to start working at 7:00 am Saturday morning. The most preparation you were allowed to do was to cut your four 16″ squares of fabric. LindaJ was first to start as she is two hours ahead of the rest of us time zone wise. Pam decided to keep LindaJ company and started with LindaJ at 7:00 Linda’s time. I knew I wouldn’t be able to start quilting at 5:00 in the morning with the two of them (I am two time zones behind LindaJ) so I decided to adopt the Mountain time zone and started at 7:00 am Mountain time (6:00 am here). Cher started closer to 7:00 Pacific time–she was probably the smartest one of the bunch because she made sure she was well rested before taking out her rotary cutter or turning on her sewing machine!

These are the fabrics that I chose for my Convergence quilt.

This is a picture early in the process. You can see the various widths that the strips are cut. Yes, the narrowest strip is cut 1″ wide–a pain but effective in the final quilt.

This is a picture after the strips are re-arranged, just before sewing them together into pairs.

These are all the strips sew together again. At this point, you turn your project 1/4 of a turn and repeat the cutting into strips, rearranging the strips, and then sewing them together again.

This is the finished top–with borders added. I have since quilted my piece and I am planning to block before binding as suggested by Ricky in his book.

This was a great day. This was a pattern/technique that I have wanted to try for a long time. I enjoyed working along with my friends and figuring out the pattern together. Having friends pulling along with you helps keep the project out of the UFO pile. Thanks to the Internet, computers, digital cameras, and IM it is possible to quilt with friends in different parts of the world!

Oh, Pam, I don’t think any of these projects turned out like POCs so your mailbox is safe!

We had so much fun that we are already planning the next quilting day.

On March 1st, A total of 29 quilters came together to make donation quilts for our guild’s We Care program.

We quilted from 9:30 to 3:30. The We Care Committee was extremely organized–as always. When we arrived, tables and chairs were already set up for us. Once we picked our spot, we proceeded to the front of the room where there was a table with our names already printed out on tags. We picked up our name tag and our hostess checked us in on her list. We were able to choose one of two quilt patterns ahead of time and then the committee put together the corresponding number of kits.

I have to show you what the kits looked like. A zip lock back contained everything but the batting and label to make the quilt. Pre-cut batting and labels were available for each of us at the end of the day. Double click on the picture below to see the detailed labels that were on the pre-cut pieces in the kits. This was quilting for dummies–how could you go wrong–the borders, fabric A, fabric B, etc were all labeled with small pieces of paper pinned to the strips. The large dragon fly fabric was my backing.

There were two “model” quilts on display to help us visualize what our finished quilts would look like–this was the first one.

This was the second quilt.

Everyone was busy all day. This hall is a favorite location for our guild workshops as there is lots of light and lots of room.

We broke for lunch, but many ate their lunch and got right back to work. Everyone was enjoying themselves so much, they didn’t want to stop.

By the end of the day, most of the quilters finished their quilts to the flimsy stage and then received assistance from the committee in sandwiching their quilts. It makes it easier to finish the quilting process at home if your quilt is already sandwiched and prepared for quilting when you leave for the day.

This quilter had to leave early so she didn’t have a chance to get her borders on yet.